We’ve blogged on several occasions about the synergy for B2Bs between social media and search engine marketing (SEM) …but mainly (as in this post) we were pretty much equating social media to blogging.
But what about the larger scope of social media …and in particular the major social networks? Well, that’s the burden of a nifty post on SearchEngineWatch by Ryan DeShazer. Ryan makes a number of great points about using social media to enhance your B2B’s search engine marketing…
Staying focused.
No question, social media can be an intimidating place for B2B marketers. Just keeping up with the many platforms and their continual drumbeat of new features is difficult; and once in, it’s very easy to become scattered.
That’s why it’s so important to have a clear goalset before entry, and an understanding of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that map to those goals. Keeping your eye on those KPIs will help inoculate you against chasing the next shiny new object.
As Ryan says, “It doesn’t matter how many times your tweets are being retweeted if your primary objective is white paper downloads … the value of social media to the organization is in its ability to produce an audience that is engaged enough to download our assets rather than creating more chatter.”
A better grasp of your market’s lingo.
Marketers are used to doing all the talking …and writing. It’s very easy for them to fall into the trap of simply assuming that their chosen representations of reality are identical to those of their target market.
Social networks, on the other hand, are a place where your customers and prospects do most of the talking. By listening, you can discern the language they use in talking about products and concepts that you need to communicate with them about …and their usage is, of course, the only one that truly matters. By mapping that terminology into your PPC ad creative, your banner ads, your SEO keyword selection, etc., there’s no way that your search marketing won’t improve as a result.
You’ll probably also discover more hot-button topics than you were previously aware of, which can feed into your white papers, blogposts and other online content creation …all making your site more relevant and findable. Ryan again: “Search programs that focus on the types of keyword phrases observed through social media and address hot-button topics tend to be the ones that stand out and convert at higher rates.”
Influencing the conversation to benefit your SEM.
As a twist on the “lingo” point above… suppose your B2B is well-positioned on a certain keyword phrase, but social media reveals the market using some variation of those phrases. Once your social-media persona has established authority and influence, you may have the option of reshaping the conversation via focused social media activity.
What might this mean? Says Ryan: “A growing body of data suggests that, as audiences are exposed to communications messaging via social, they turn to search and perform independent research before forming opinions. … (Hence) it’s possible to seed content through an authoritative social persona that subtly recasts the conversation around the keyword phrases that the company is already well-positioned for.”
Link-building impact.
Social media has totally changed the nature of sharing content online. Historically, content was shared through blog posts or references from websites; now, people share hot content through Twitter tweets and Facebook wall posts.
Although links from most social sites don’t pass along any Google authority, the more frequently a website is referenced via social media, the more frequently its content will be crawled and indexed. As Ryan puts it: “The arms race to solve real-time search gets more aggressive by the day, and you can take advantage of that by promoting your share-worthy content through social media outlets. Trust me, Google will follow.”
Social media participation can definitely improve your search engine marketing; the guidance above should help you to maximize those beneficial effects.
